Slavery by Another Name (70 page)

Casey ordered two other black laborers to hold him across a barrel

and began whipping again. Lash upon lash fel across his back and

but ocks. Final y the unnamed man was released. "The negro

staggered o to one side and fel across a lumber pile there, and

laid there for a while," testi ed one witness. Soon he was dead. The

camp doctor declared the cause of death to have been drinking too

much water before going to work at the kiln.13

On Sundays, white men came to the Chat ahoochee brickyard to

buy, sel , and trade black men as they had livestock and, a

generation earlier, slaves on the block. "They had them stood up in

a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would

a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would

a mule," Cochran said. "They would look at a man in the row and

say, ‘Trot him around and let me see him move.’ They would come

to one fel ow and they say ‘there is a god damn good one.’ …They

would make such remarks as, ‘There is a man worth two hundred

and fifty dol ars. There is one worth two hundred.’ "

A similar picture emerged in the investigation around slave camps

and coal mines owned by Joel Hurt, the rich Atlanta real estate

developer and investor most remembered in Atlanta as the

visionary behind the city's earliest and most elegant subdivisions.

Virtual y every white person of any social signi cance lived in one

or the other of Hurt's signature developments—the High Victorian

Inman Park or Druid Hil s, an area of wide promenades and lush

parks designed at his behest by the rm of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Hurt was also the founder of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank—the

city's other preeminent nancial institution, the streetcar operator

that became Georgia's rst electric power company, and an early

investor in concerns that would become some of the most iconic

companies in the South. His namesake building near the Five Points

business center dominated the early Atlanta skyline at seventeen

stories—making it one of the tal est structures of the early twentieth

century.

In 1895, Hurt bought a group of bankrupt forced labor mines and

furnaces on Lookout Mountain, near the Tennessee state line. The

mines were previously owned by former Georgia governor Joseph

E. Brown, who enthusiastical y led the secessionist movement in

Georgia prior to 1861, governed the state during the Civil War

years, and afterward remained a staunch defender of antebel um

slavery.

The most powerful politician in Georgia from the 1860s until his

death in 1894, Brown, stil contemptuous of the Emancipation

Proclamation, l ed his mines with scores of black men forced into

the shafts against their wil . A legislative commit ee visiting the sites

the same year Hurt bought them said the prisoners were "in the

the same year Hurt bought them said the prisoners were "in the

very worst condition …actual y being starved and have not

su cient clothing …treated with great cruelty." Of particular note

to the visiting o cials was that the mine claimed to have replaced

whipping with the water cure torture—in which water was poured

into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners—because it al owed miners

to "go to work right away" after punishment.14

Cal ed to testify before the commission at the Georgia capitol in

1908, Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic

for any aspect of the sprawling business he'd taken over from

Brown and aggressively expanded through the traf ic of forced black

laborers.

After acquiring Brown's mines, Hurt ramped up production, in

part to ful l contracts to sel coal to Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad in Birmingham—which couldn't get enough fuel and ore

from its own slave mines to keep furnaces burning at ful operation.

Hurt already had 125 convicts in his largest slave mine. He bought

one of English's mines to acquire fty men held there, and then set

out to obtain even more forced laborers from other work camps

around the state.

Hurt's gentle appearance in the witness chair—wavy black hair

slicked to his scalp and a soft shaven face that de ed the day's

convention for thick mustaches—was an almost obscene contrast to

the account of slave trading he quietly of ered the commit ee.

Needing more laborers in 1904, Hurt, who identi ed his

profession as "capitalist," said he turned to a man who was "trading

in" the sale and resale of leases on convicts. Soon, he was put in

touch with J. W. Cal ahan, who held thirty-nine black and two

white men on a turpentine farm in the deep woods of south

Georgia. Hurt wrote him on Christmas Eve asking if the men could

be purchased. "If you wil name the lowest price at which you are

wil ing to dispose of them, we may be able to come to an

agreement," Hurt wrote. "In making a price, state whether the men

are average able-bodied; how many of them are white, if any;

whether any of them are maimed or crippled, or in any way

whether any of them are maimed or crippled, or in any way

disabled…. Yours very truly, Joel Hurt."15

Over the next week, amid the yuletide and New Year

celebrations, Hurt and Cal ahan furiously traded let ers and

telegrams negotiating an arrangement for fty black men. Cal ahan

rst demanded an up-front fee of $200 per worker—or a total of

$10,000—fol owed by monthly payments totaling $200 a year for

each man. The price of slave labor had changed lit le in fifty years.

Hurt countero ered an $8,000 up-front fee, and urgently wired

his thirty-one-year-old son, George, managing the company's iron

furnace on Lookout Mountain, that the men had been obtained.

Before the deal could be consummated, though, Cal ahan was

contacted by another bidder. On January 6, 1905, he sold the men

to the competitor in an al -cash transaction.16 An infuriated Hurt

continued to wheel and deal in the byzantine web of Georgia's slave

tra c—threatening lawsuits against Cal ahan when he failed to

deliver laborers on time and giving cash to state wardens who

demanded payo s to facilitate the movement of laborers from one

location to another. "We wil hold you for al damages which we

may sustain if you fail or refuse to deliver the convicts," Hurt wrote

Cal ahan in early 1905.17

The re ned Atlanta businessman was nonchalant when the

legislators asked about execrable descriptions of his camps, blaming

any excesses on lax guards and wardens who—despite the payo s

made by his companies— he said refused to work the prisoners

hard enough.

"They would stand up and let a convict run away from them and

be afraid to shoot at him, and the only way to get a warden that

was any account was to pay him extra money," Hurt testi ed.

"When a convict starts to escape he ought to shoot, he ought to stop

him or run him down and catch him."18

Another witness before the commission—former chief warden

Jake Moore—testi ed that no prison guard could ever "do enough

whipping for Mr. Hurt."

"He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Moore told

"He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Moore told

the panel.19

When the commission cal ed Hurt's son George to testify, the

younger Hurt said convicts in his coal mines had been punished too

lit le—not too much. Asked to cite an occasion when a warden

refused to punish a prisoner who should have been, Hurt said: "That

would be like numbering the sands of the seashore."20

"Do you remember what you wanted them whipped for?"

responded a commissioner.

"For the lack of work," the younger Hurt replied.

"What was the task you required of them?"

"From two to six tons," said Hurt.

Asked why men had been forced to work in the mines into the

night, violating prison rules that convicts should labor only from

sunup to sundown, Hurt mocked the question: "Yes sir, but they are

under the ground and it's rather hard for the warden to tel exactly

when the sun is up or down."

Hurt was also sarcastical y dismissive of charges that arose from

the death of a black convict named Liddel , explaining that the man

died not because of a whipping he received but because of "the

bursting of a blood vessel while the convict was struggling against a

whipping."

Hurt said Liddel was a huge man, weighing nearly three hundred

pounds, who refused to enter the mines. A guard chained Liddel to

a tree in the same yard where the boy named Wynne had been

beaten to death, and forced him to sit for hours exposed to the

bright sun. Later, the guard ordered Liddel to lie down for a

whipping. When he refused, four men held Liddel while the guard

whipped him with a leather strap. Liddel began "growing purple

under the eyes," and later died, Hurt testi ed. He added that the

blood vessel most likely burst because "the man was guilty of

commit ing masturbation to such an extent that his mind had

become af ected."

Hurt said he witnessed another occasion when the warden was

Hurt said he witnessed another occasion when the warden was

struggling to deal with a "powerful negro …who had been

insubordinate ever since" arriving at the mine. To force the prisoner

to begin digging, a guard told another black convict, named Jim

Blevens, to at ack him. The two African American men, both forced

against their wil s into the coal mine camp, now stood in the prison

yard facing each other like gladiators, holding mining picks in their

hands. The face-o lasted only seconds. The "insubordinate" man

lunged forward, swinging his pick wildly. The smal er man stepped

aside to dodge the at ack and then swung his own tool in a high

downward arc. The long blade of the pick descended onto the other

man's head—piercing his jaw, throat, and chest. The wounded

prisoner fel to the ground, Hurt testi ed, and Blevens "then put his

foot on the negro's head and pul ed his pick out." The injured man

died from the wound.21

As the legislative inquiry progressed into August 1908, the sordid

stories of il ness and mayhem—coupled with even more

voluminous accounts of corruption and payo s—stirred an

outpouring of public condemnation. Atlanta's leading pastor, Dr.

James W Lee, sermonized at Trinity Church that the convict leasing

system was a "disgrace" to the state. His and other churches passed

resolutions cal ing on the legislature to abolish the practice

entirely22

A technological y more advanced competitor in the brick-making

business—a young engineer named B. Mi in Hood—began

advertising "Non-Convict Bricks" in the Atlanta Constitution. The

city council—which previously bought mil ions of the former

mayor's hard red rectangles to pave hundreds of blocks of sidewalks

—voted to bar the purchase of any goods made by convicts.

Final y a crowd of more than two thousand people gathered for a

mass meeting in Atlanta's Grand Opera House—the same forum

where The Clansman had drawn sel -out crowds two years earlier.

Presided over by the state's sit ing governor, Hoke Smith, the

gathering listened to a series of speeches condemning the lease

system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its

system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its

abolition. Similar public meetings in the town of Rome and

elsewhere across Georgia on the same day produced the same

result. Newspaper editorials chimed in agreement—though most

said the prisoners should be taken out of private hands and put to

work improving the state's desperately inferior roads.23

Spurred by the public outcry, Governor Smith cal ed a special

session of the state legislature, which authorized a public

referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's

nearly al -white electorate voted by a two-to-one margin to abolish

the system as of March 1909. Without slave labor, business

col apsed at Chat ahoochee Brick. Production fel by nearly 50

percent in the next year. Sales—of nineteen mil ion bricks—

dropped to less than half of 1907. Total pro t dwindled to less

than $13,000.24

The apparent demise of Georgia's system of leasing prisoners

seemed a harbinger of a new day—especial y coming just two years

after Atlanta's bloody race riot. Social progressives applauded the